Sam Basu & Matt Bryans
Kate MacGarry, London, UK
Think of the ubiquitous holiday snap: your grandparents with the friends they made on holiday; a sparse hotel room, tidy for the only time that week; the long stretch of beach crammed with other holiday-makers taking similar photos; a pool bar with ostentatious cocktails raised to toast the photographer; red raw shoulders at the beginning of the spool and the steadily increasing tan towards the end. It’s the archiving of a week in Alicante, Corfu, or Hastings. Most households will have them somewhere and they will sit largely undisturbed, growing dustier and dustier.
For Matt Bryans and Sam Basu’s first collaboration, fifty-eight found images are shown by slide carousel in the middle of Kate MacGarry’s small space. The installation is simple, echoing the ramshackle set-up you may find in a domestic slide viewing session, where equipment is layered upon both tables and books so that everyone can see. The exhibition version departs only in an intricate cascade of cables wired to amplifiers and speakers, through which a specially composed soundtrack is piped, playing unrelentingly over the top of the changing images. This noise is the amalgam of Basu’s quickening drum-beat and Bryans’ constant whirring of an unidentifiable machine which seems to drone on without break – it is this addition that moves the viewing set-up into a more sinister and insistent demand on the viewer’s attention.
Given the decline of actual printed photographs since the beginning of the digital age, this could be an interesting exercise in itself, putting faded, round-cornered snapshots into the concentrated and stark setting of the gallery. But Bryans and Basu don’t seem to be much concerned with the viewer gorging on whatever personal nostalgia the slides evoke. The contents of these images have a slightly unnerving absurdity that prompts a double-take: alongside grandpas and aunties sipping their drinks is the sneaking incongruity of Halloween-themed pageantry. A woman cycles along a beach-front path – or wait, does she? No, a pig-faced woman cycles along a beach-front path and a man sits not with his wife but alongside a mannequin with glazed eyes and lurid make-up. It’s not your cousin being tripped by a wave, but a mummy swathed in bandages. These images and the farcical scenes that they document show the miniature spectacles and bizarre performances staged by a pre-prepared and theatrically jovial group of holiday-makers. Aside from being both remarkably well-constructed photographs and genuinely fantastical in what they capture, this slide show constitutes an exhibition of the glorious oddity that lurks, mostly silent, in everyone.
Ilsa Colsell
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